Bella DePaulo - How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

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Copyright 2015 by Bella DePaulo

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First Atria Books/Beyond Words hardcover edition August 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DePaulo, Bella M.

How we live now : redefining home and family in the 21st century / Bella DePaulo.

pagescm

Includes bibliographical references.

1.FamiliesUnited States.2.DwellingsSocial aspectsUnited States.3.LifestylesUnited States.I.Title.

HQ536.D42972015

306.850973dc23

2015004194

ISBN 978-1-58270-479-1

ISBN 978-1-4767-6300-2 (ebook)

The corporate mission of Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.: Inspire to Integrity

To my siblings, Peter, Lisa, and Joseph

And to lifespace pioneers everywhere, finding their place, their space, and their people, and inspiring us all

BELLA DePAULO, PhD, is an award-winning social psychologist and the author of Singled Out. She was described by Atlantic magazine as Americas foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. She has lectured nationally and internationally, and appeared on the Today show, Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, NBC Nightly News, Hardball with Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper 360 , and NPR. Her research and writing have been featured in the New York Times , the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, Time, the Economist , and blogs for Psychology Today and Psych Central . DePaulo is currently a project scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Visit Dr. DePaulos website at BellaDePaulo.com.

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I ve been writing about single life for many years, in academic articles, in my book Singled Out , and in blogs such as Living Single at PsychologyToday.com. I take on just about every aspect of single life that is of interest to people who want to live their single lives fully and joyfully. In 2010, I wrote a blog post, Not Going Nuclear: So Many Ways to Live and Love, with the tagline, Increasingly, households and personal communities are not anchored by couples. Right away, readers began to share stories of their own non-nuclear ways of living that they had found magical. They talked about their communities of friends from their young adult lives and the extended families of their childhood. They lovingly described people who were not relatives yet had been invited into their homes and their lives. They admitted to their envy of couples who are truly committed to being with each other for the long term but not to living together. Rather than attracting trolls, the discussion generated reactions such as, Your comment brings tears to my eyes.

Other readers emailed their stories to me rather than posting them online. That continued long after the post was published. The topic had captured their imagination and their emotions. Still, I may not have pursued the matter any further if I hadnt noticed something elselots of people were talking about this beyond my one little blog post. Within just a few years, stories about imaginative living arrangements appeared in major newspapers and news services such as the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Wall Street Journal , USA Today , and Reuters, in sections ranging from garden and homes to aging, to the national and regional pages and the opinion pages. Magazines such as the Atlantic , Time , Newsweek/Daily Beast , More , SmartMoney , Elle , and Dwell all described innovations in living. Segments aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. Regional media highlighted local examples, and bloggers of many stripes swapped stories and shared fantasies.

It was time to take the topic seriously. I wanted to learn more about the creative ways of living that todays adults are fashioning. I wanted to go beyond the mostly brief sketches that had been published and explore in greater depth the psychology of the choices people are making. I wanted to know how people living in different ways get help when they need it and companionship when they want it. I wondered what home means to people who are not living with family. I wanted to hear about the different arrangements people tried, what worked for them and what didnt, and what they learned about themselves along the way.